Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property

Written evidence submitted by Chris Terry

I have been a professional photographer for 15 years. I work in the mainly in the editorial field of photography and would like to explain why the protection of my IP is crucial to my business.

I am a one man band and what I earn comes directly from the commissions I secure from my clients and the re-license of the images via my library. My business is extremely competitive and constantly under pressure from the same clients that commission me. This pressure comes in the form of reduced fees, 90 days to get paid irrespective of what my terms are and a greater demand on the rights to my images. This includes the forced waiver of Moral Rights. The deal is simple for them, agree our terms or don’t work for us. These include large corporations such as the BBC.

So with work already hard to come by, negotiate and sustain, the Hargreaves IP review suggestions would potentially help to drive it under.

My moral rights are not automatically granted in the UK, this should be an automatic assertion and unwaivable as in other EU countries. The right to be identified as a UK citizen and creator, I should have these rights granted automatically as they help to protect my only asset, my archive of work, by identifying me as author.

Introducing legislation to allow the licensing of Orphan Works before the legal framework asserting an authors Moral rights in being identified is plain daft. It will create more Orphan Works.

Artists rights have not been recognized as human rights by the Hargreaves IP review where as the UN and EU human rights act have:

· Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

· These rights are also attacked by the lack of legal consequence for the removal of digital identifiers and metadata in images.

I ask you to look more closely at the IP review and please speak to the people most affected by any great changes, namely the creators.

5 September 2011